5th work – The Jock (x) a Saltworks extract

Mixed messages acclimatized…flat dry sweep of th’hand across a tabletop. Gathering crumbs from a meal of bread’n cheese. The sound of the hand edge on the weave of the cloth. Swish, swish…my focus is a strange affair, your conscience sitting on the shoulder, always going too far enuff to hold you back. Kiss’em there an’ kill ’em there. Eyes too sweep out over the table tops of a million meals of days’n days… and yet you’re always expected to save th’world.

down in the coffee bar, stainless steel and you’re feeling pretty good for a change, luck holding…
nibbling pieces out of her ear while gazing at your cake and mentioning something about the creative state and moving your hands in an intelligent fashion…
 it’s in the bag as around you the people’s eyes blink in that clip-clop, hi-tech, hi-fi language of the day…
music playing distant and trendy and she says…
so this writer is impossible to relate to, like nobody can follow him and if they say they can then it’s a lie…
the fool already cupping her breasts and making himself at home about her body and she goes on to say…
I read him because I know he’s making a fool of me and everyone else and I like that, I really like that…
swans neck I see, softness, coolness and then I say…
I read him because he says what I want to create with these hands, you see, we meet somewhere…
She looks…
jeez, I said something cool and I’m laughing, leaning back, lighting another of her fags and about then in their world of make believe chit-chat pseudo tête-à-tête the planet is in chaos…
white light charred lipless tooth filled grins, flash, flash and the babies fry… smelling all of this great background, catching glimpses and hints from our TVs, so hungry my morning dance to the sun up big red rubber ball and mists swirling thickly to reveal a place in this for all of us…
duke box in there too, hey, let me buy you another, then order some breakfast and something sharp to chase it down, spend the day in the sack, blow the day down with the pigswill of our dreams and night come again soon…
give us more bright lights and large sounds and numbness and we’ll talk about it over something soft…
just how good was it for you and is it something you do often and a whole heap of colloquial rendezvous inspired by the screen or books or the odd toilet wall as somewhere others pray in their own way for a few grains of rice as skin dries stretched over skeleton frame and they huddle together in heaps of rotten sacking, hearts, flesh and blood because they love too you know and they breath and cry and laugh while others brainwashed, hunt them…
fueled by such blasphemed names as power and greed and fear of God and give a helping hand as we too shake in our boots, piss on our neighbor, don’t take from my pile, cash in your pocket, crap on my screen, food on my table, smile on my…

Copyright © Graeme Perrin 2023